What’s the consensus here? Tinderbox appears to recognise filenames with spaces and finds them easily. This is convenient, as I often receive and send files with spaces - not to mention, not too many people in the real world are as taken as I with CamelCase naming lol.
Then again, the old-school in me feels the need to play it safe, and trim spaces. Not all environments/apps recognise spaces in file paths and names without the help of "\ ".
Does it make a difference? What are your preferences when naming files that may end up as $File targets?
It’s contextual, i.e. where you want to use the file. But of course you don’t know this before the fact, so that helps little.
I find newer systems, addressed this issue as youngsters get bored learning about 8.3 filenames and design ones that just work. Older ones, e.g. slow-moving corporate tech, still assume a grey-beard gatekeeper who will tell you the problem is your fault—failure to understand computing limits in the 1960s—and depart without explaining how to fix the issue. Still, generally, new systems are getting better. The problem is avoiding the “well it worked 20 years ago and I’m not updating it” systems; banks seem conservative about change, but perhaps with reasons (preventing leakage of assets).
I’m also cautious about things like accented letters and symbols in words, but that’s a very privileged English-centric view: no accents/non-base-roman characters … and frankly, no consistent grammar rules either!
It’s only important docs (tax/bank/licences/etc.) where future me needs the doc to open/be found that I take extra effort to name defensively.
Fair points. I just have the recurring nightmare that I wake up and none of my file links work any more because OSX has reverted to the 31-character HFS protocol…
I’m not sure there is a cure for such recurring nightmares, especially for those who lived through doing cross-OS text manipulation in the '90s. Then again, if one is writing in Cyrilic on a system set for Dravidian script am sure there is still ‘fun’ to be had. It seems the ‘universal translator’ is still some way off.
